Creating venues for poetry in support of healthy ocean communities

FOLLOWING THE RUN by Grace Cavalieri

And so it continues like a book open with words escaping each page
turning, here and there a bend, leaving the earth.

The oil endures beyond what I write with my finger in the soil,
so yellow it’s brown.

The first person on earth could have looked and thought,
this water is life itself.

But we now think it unfolds more like death, blue and grey streams,
beyond what can be seen.

And we also think, like life, not death, we could have saved it for the world.

–Grace Cavalieri

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STATEMENT

Each year my husband and I travel to Key West. We sit on the pier and try to capture the pelicans: We try to remove the fish hooks from their wings. They cannot do it for themselves of course. Many folks are there each day trying to do this same thing. Fish hooks and fish lines are imbedded in the birds’ wings and they, although crippled, attempt to fly and live that way. Now add oil onto the feathers. It’s enough to break your heart.